Posts Tagged ‘social networks’

for those of us who do research in linking the online (social media) and offline worlds, it is very important to keep in mind the demographics of different social media services.

In Sept 09, according to Nielsen Claritas [], “the blogging and tweeting community at large isn’t necessarily more affluent, but bloggers and tweeters do live in more urban areas such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago.”

african american were more likely to join twitter than other racial groups. hargiatti&litt found out why that was the case, and they did so upon analysing *longitudinal* data (i.e., user cialis 100mg data in 2009 and service (twitter) adoption in 2010). the predictors of twitter adoption in 2010 were:
1) be african american
2) having

web skills (as for 2009)
3) interest in (as for 2009): entertainment/celebrity news (this topic entirely explained the higher level of adoption for african american); science&research&technology&politics&news (negatively correlated. warning: these topics were negatively correlated for the age group under study – which was college students in chicago; for an older cohort, these topics might well matter).

These results are very US-centric, so here are few pointers about UK folks in social media: USA (2010); UK; Britan; London.

I gave a seminar yesterday in the Mobisys weekly seminars at UCL and I would be pleased to share my slides with you. It was about Pervasive Social Computing, or how to support social networks in pervasive computing environments in order to enable social interactivity between mobile users.

Any feedback is welcome and if you have any question I will pleased to answer.

Here is a very interesting talk (Slides+Audio) by Story Henry a researcher at Sun Microsystems interested in the Semantic Web and Social Networks.

Henry gave this presentation at JavaOne 2008, and at the Internet Identity Workshop and the Data Sharing Summit in Mountain View this May.

The slides cover data portability between Social Networks, linked data, foaf (Friend Of A Friend project), security in distributed social networks, OpenId, they demo a real semantic Address Book written in Java, explain how it works, SPARQL (a query language for the semantic Web), introduce one to rules, and give some ideas as to what a semantic desktop will look like…

This is something I found while looking for social networking datasets:
“Many Eyes” has range of different datasets( e.g. facebook, secondlife, etc) and also provides users with different styles of visualizations. I guess it is quite useful when you want to visualize a small dataset (fraction of traces) without the need of coding visualization parts.

Ebay took advantage of the new trend and has just created more than 600 social Networks with the name “Neighborhoods”, which are focused around a central product or topic theme like ‘iphone’ , ‘star wars’, even ‘coffee lovers’ (The latter seems to be the most popular so far with 453 members). By this way sellers and buyers come together and can exchange opinions, recommendations, stories. More info on the subject at the TechCrunch site